Monday, 2 May 2016

The __init__ to my GSoC selection:

Okay,so all this begun when I entered college about two years ago.The two terms to motivate us towards excellence used by our seniors were "Google Summer of Code" and "ACM ICPC".Since then my fascination for GSoC began and never seemed to calm down.

Okay,so now time-warp:and now I was in my fourth semester.It was the month of January and now I knew it was high time to have a focussed working towards GSoC.Having done considerably good open source contribution,I was in my groove and now shifted my focus to my dream organization "Mozilla".I knew this wasn't going to be easy.

The particular component to interest me was their Firefox for android component namely "Fennec".Being well acquainted with android,I felt immediately comfortable with the codebase(something that never happens in open source contribution to a new org so fast).As time proceeded, an intense jan-mid Feb was good enough to provide me with a few effective patches.Ok,so i was on the right track.

Then came a surge of academic commitments: exams, assignments, projects all guns blazing.Somehow knocking the out and what do I see , its march.A few more commits and the orgs were announced by google.So now that mozilla was in,I browsed through all the projects.Ok so one detail,I always had this fascination for networking security.I somehow felt a pull towards it from the beginning and wanted to do something in it.It was then that I stumbled upon NSS- mozilla's network security services library.

Ok,So then I met this super cool guy called David.I read few details about libraries written by him(mainly openconnect) and so now my fascination shifted from an individual project to rather working with him.As I contacted him with something you could call as my resume,he being ever so friendly instantly appreciated my previous work and suggested a project regarding the PKCS 11 URI scheme.On explaining further, it immediately caught my attention.I wen through a few articles on PKCS 11, the cryptoki API, RFC 7512 and all the works.Somehow I felt the project was something I would be interested in and so with david's help, made a few commits to the existing NSS library to get acquainted with the existing codebase and also strengthen my GSoC proposal.

Then David introduced me Robert,another very cool guy who was one of the core developers of the NSS library.He also welcomed me with a lot of warmth to the NSS library, solved a few doubts and so now with david and Rob by my side had the full confidence that this project was the one I was "destined" to do.

So as time progressed , I submitted my proposal.Now that my job was done,I shifted my focus back to college acads.So now the day was finally here, 22nd April.This was probably the most nervous I could ever be.Finally as the results were announced, I WAS IN..YAY!!!

This was I believe the most ecstatic I had ever been.All my friends rushing into my room pulling me out for a very ancient ritual in my college GPL.A solid beating and a juice treat later, all was calm.It was now time to live my dream of a "Summer of code".

So the points to take:
1.Focus on an org of your choice and give it your everything.
2.Patience is very vry important in the beginning(given the huge code base).
3.keep interacting with the community.Believe me,they're awesome!

So,that's all for this one.
I'll keep you all posted on all further developments and phases of the summer of code :)